Leftists regard Trump’s deportation plans as unthinkable. They thought nothing of similar plans when they were Obama’s.
President-elect Donald Trump has taken a great deal of abuse for proposing the deportation of millions of illegal aliens, potentially as many or even more than Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush deported while in office — 12.29 million and 10.32 million, respectively if counting both formal removals and returns. Leftists and liberal publications, including some that previously tried to blame the Republican for Obama’s “cages,” have characterized Trump’s plan not only as unprecedented but as authoritarian, brutal, costly, fascistic, illegal, racist, and xenophobic.
CNN admitted Wednesday that Trump’s supposedly unthinkable plan is not only business as usual where immigration enforcement is concerned — discounting the past four years — but reminiscent of the approach taken by an idol of the American left: former President Barack Obama.
“While Trump’s allies have floated draconian measures to detain and deport people residing in the U.S. illegally, the plans are, in many ways, consistent with the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement has often carried out operations,” wrote CNN’s White House correspondent Priscilla Alvarez.
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Not only is there a resemblance in approach, the personnel executing the plan are in some cases carryovers.
Trump’s border czar nominee Tom Homan was appointed by Obama in 2013 as Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations. Homan did such a good job kicking criminal noncitizens out of the country that the Democratic administration gave him the Distinguished Rank Award in 2015.
‘They’re not doing anything new.’
“A lot of the same tactics are being dusted off,” John Sandweg, who served as an acting ICE director under Obama, told CNN. “What Tom is talking about are Obama-esque things. He’s going to have to do more draconian things to do a million deportations in a year.”
When accounting for both removals and returns, the Migration Policy Institute indicated Obama deported over 5.2 million noncitizens between 2009 and 2016 and sent nearly one million noncitizens (973,937) packing in his first year. If strictly counting deportations through removal orders, then Obama oversaw more than any other American president up until that time — at least 2.9 million noncitizens.
While the liberal press remained more or less deferential, the Latino advocacy group National Council of La Raza (now UnidosUS), the ACLU, and other leftist groups dubbed the Democratic president the “deporter in chief.”
Trump, evidently held to a different standard, has previously alluded to the efficacy of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” where the U.S. Military helped deport up to 1.3 million illegal aliens within a few months. While CNN noted a similar operation would constitute a dramatic shift in interior enforcement by recent standards, the publication reiterated that the plan so far articulated by Trump aides, again, resembles actions taken during Obama’s tenure.
For instance, Homan told Center Square last month the “priorities will focus on public safety threats, national security threats and fugitives.” CNN noted that “ICE has generally been instructed to follow that protocol, including under President Joe Biden.”
Although critics have pounced on Homan for telling the Washington Examiner and indicating the same in other interviews that “in sanctuary cities, expect a lot of collateral arrests,” that was similarly the case during enforcement operations under previous administrations.
The use of military bases to temporarily detain illegal aliens, the return of family detention, and other elements of Trump’s quickly solidifying plan were also championed, implemented, and/or expanded by past Democratic administrations.
“They’re not doing anything new. None of these ideas that are being tossed about are new,” Jason House, former ICE chief of staff under the Biden administration, told the liberal publication.
